RIESMAN CONSIDERED
553
upon his difference. "... When we think how much suffering he under–
went and caused, we cannot unequivocally condemn the propaganda
of adjustment to which contemporary eccentrics are exposed." The dis–
enchantment of Veblen and that of Mark Twain is somehow not of the
first order; these Middle Westerners are not secure enough socially to
afford the "ennui-pessimism of the Eastern patricians," such as Henry
and Brooks Adams. In Veblen's character we are told there is a great
deal of the "saboteur"-he is always sneaking about, slyly refusing to
co-operate. "His strategies of non-compliance are in this interpretation
only the end product, codified by recognition, of a repressed inner urge
to show off." And "more important was Veblen's fear of eminence, of
the dark unnameable dangers attendant upon putting oneself forward,
out in the open, an object of critical notice, a target before spectators."
But this is fantastic-Veblen
was
great and many a man ready to stand
up and be counted among the eminent is not.
Riesman suggests that the desire to provoke envy, the psychological
basis of Veblen's "conspicuous consumption," has in prosperous America
been replaced by the
fear
of being envied. This notion is impossible to
credit; the fear of being envied is an eccentricity, just as outrageous to
the majority as it has always been. The desire to repudiate their priv–
ileges does exist for certain people and is nothing new. The princess anJ
the footman is not so different from the "liberal girl" in her occasional
excursions into the lower orders. One of the pleasant rights of those
on top is to sink, whereas the lowly have only the possibility of trying
laboriously to move upward.
The essays on Freud in
Individualism Reconsidered
are very strik–
ing and often more than a little puzzling. Freud is immense, yes, but
is this striving, gloomy thinker "right" for us, for America? Riesman,
smiling loftily at "pessimism" as if it were an old contraption now re–
placed by a new manufacture, often finds our American experience to
be mysteriously different from the generally human one. Freud could
not foresee what would happen to our economy and so he is a bit out
of date, an attitude which reminds one of other critics' frantic as–
sertion that Freud could not say much to us because his clinical knowl–
edge came largely from wealthy Viennese Jews. The struggle for life,
the brutal need to make one's bread and one's fate in a competitive
society were taken for granted by Freud. Bitterly enduring and striving
he did not foresee an America in which hunger is confined to people
on a reducing diet. Riesman says about Freud, "Certainly, his utilitarian
and Philistine attitudes toward work and play were both central to his
own view of life and a dominant note in his cultural environment. But
